As I've said in the main course introduction, an individual's mark in this course is determined by two factors: (1) time and effort; and (2) how much of your own learning you can explain and demonstrate and convey to others. Here's some more explanation of how are these measured, and how they fit together to produce a mark.
This course has some categorical requirements. If you do not fulfill these requirements, you will not get credit for the course. I am happy to arrange for withdrawals without penalty whenever it becomes obvious that someone cannot fulfill them, for whatever reasons (and I always assume people have good reasons). I've listed the requirements in that introduction..
First, there's simply time and work put in. My basic rule of thumb for figuring out how much work a course should take is this: since a full-time professional job is usually expected to take about 40 hours of a person's week, and since this three-credit, one-term class is one-fifth of a full time load, I expect a student to put in about eight hours every week -- including time spent in class -- on work directly connected with this course. I have tried to estimate the various assignments and tasks so that they can be done in that amount of time, and if people report that they're consistently taking longer I'll make adjustments. But basically the way I can know if you're putting in the time beyond simple attendance (since -- like other professionals -- you don't have a time clock to punch or a desk to be at) is by knowing whether you produce, on time and in the correct location, the necessary work: electronic mail, reports, postings to discussions, engagement in organizing and presenting web pages and publications, etc. I keep pretty thorough records of how much work people produce, how often they attend class, etc., and I use these records to generate, mathematically, a minimum mark somewhere up to a B. If someone does every single thing that it's possible to do her mark cannot fall below B. Most people don't do that much work, of course (with the best will in the world, things happen), but in the majority of cases almost everyone in a class does enough work (usually, about three-quarters of the tasks I can identify and count) to guarantee a mark between B and C-. This minimum mark is calculated mathematically, and adjusted to make sure that anyone who's worked consistently gets a minimum higher than a C-. This, then, constitutes a floor or minimum grade. Once this grade is established, you cannot receive a lower grade (in other words, if you do every task I count during the term, your grade cannot be lower than B).
How do you actually get an A (or a mark above the minimum, or any mark if your involvement doesn't qualify you for a minimum)? The first thing to remember here is that this is in large measure a course in learning how to be aware of what you're learning, of knowing when you've become able to do or understand something you couldn't do or understand before. The second thing is that it's also in large measure a process of learning things yourself so that you can help others learn them (I believe the best way to learn is to teach). But of course this raises a couple of problems: how is it possible for me to keep track of how much you've helped other people learn, since I'm usually not there when that process is going on? And how can I possibly know whether you're becoming a better monitor of your own learning? In general, it happens because you think and write about the process, and that thinking and writing is used to generate an alternative to the minimum mark established by your participation. Here's how this works.
After the course is underway -- about the second or third week -- I'll invite you to begin a process whereby one of your regular weekly tasks will be to write a public reflective learning journal, a "learning log," keeping track of your own learning and sharing it with others. At the end of the term I'll ask you to go back though that journal and the rest of your work in the course, selecting from, editing, and focusing it, and produce a document which synthesizes and makes clear the important things you've learned and how you learned them. You might think of that final synthesis as an examination in which, fundamentally, you decide what to write about.
You'll make this document available publicly, and at some point I'll organize a process of assessment to help you evaluate your own learning document. Finally, though, I'll have a look at your edited reflective synthesis of your own learning, make my own judgment about how convincing and concrete it is, and determine a mark according to my judgment of the amount of learning demonstrated. In the past I've excerpted some particularly promising or effective such reflections and made them available on the course Web site. All of this will make up a second minimum mark, a qualitatively based one. You will receive whichever of the two marks is higher. It's important to be clear about this: the two marks are separate. One is quantitative, the other is based on my judgment of your learning reflection. You get the higher of the two.
Two things about this process need to be understood. One is that a minimum mark, generated by simple participation in the work of the course, can't be lowered. If you do the work, I can't decide later on that I don't like the way you did it. The second thing is that my judgment about the quality of your work and learning plays a very clearly defined role in this process. Most of the mark is generated by factors outside my judgment, but there are a couple of places where my judgment is crucial. First, below the possible B guaranteed by doing everything I have records of, I decide how much work is necessary to generate a given minimum mark (not on an individual basis, but for the class as a whole). Second, there's no way for me to evaluate the convincingness and concreteness of your learning log except subjectively: I simply make a professional judgment.
What will this require from you? At least once every week you'll need to spend a half hour or so identifying and explaining the most important learning you've experienced in the preceding period, and the people from whom you learned it, and how. The learning journal entries will "count" toward your commitment to the course, like other assignments, and by their nature (like many other assignments in this course), there's no way to do them later. So you'll need to budget the time to do this every week. I think you'll find it more than simply a task to get done: in my experience, this kind of log is the best possible way to make you feel more confident about your own learning.
I expect (or at least hope) that all this will make you able to forget about "grade anxiety" and get on with the course, that it will help you do work because it needs to be done rather than for a mark. One of the worst things about courses where you are often working with other people, or where you're expected to do the actual learning on your own, is the poisonous effect of not knowing "how you're doing," and your suspicion that other people are "getting by" with little work and you're not getting credit for all your own effort and ability (if you've worked in groups in a conventional class, where the group was marked as a whole, you've probably felt this). In this case, though, you'll have a clear idea what your minimum mark is, and you'll also have a clearer idea than in most classes of how much you're learning .
It's probably obvious by this point that sheer persistence counts for a lot in this course: if you simply work regularly and consistently at it, you can't do badly. On the other hand, it's important to notice this: the course structure simply doesn't allow for a strategy which works quite well for many other courses -- that is, to take it easy through most of the term and then work really hard in the last few weeks. Work intended to inform others and help them with the next step in their learning can't be "made up later" -- it's like coming to a party the next day (this is especially true since stage productions are unique, time-limited experiences). Once you're behind in this course, in general it's extremely difficult or impossible to catch up. If that's your usual pattern, you'll have to change it; if you don't think you can change it, this in itself should be enough to make you seriously consider taking another course. I hope, of course, everyone will find it easy to keep up because the work comes in manageable parts.